Party animals

The takeover of the NSW Liberals has been marked by patience,
stealth and attention to every bylaw in the party's constitution,
write Anne Davies and Andrew Clennell.

LIBERAL Party members in Hornsby get around. Only a month ago
120 branch members transferred to the Beaumont Hills branch near
Kellyville. Most were from the Maronite Christian community and
many had had only a passing involvement in the party.

A month before they had missed out on the chance to influence
the preselection for the state seat of Hornsby after the NSW
Opposition Leader, Peter Debnam, insisted that the sitting member,
the moderate Judy Hopwood, be returned.

Now, it seems, they want to play a role in choosing the
candidate in Hawkesbury. So they've moved branches. In force.

Preselections always bring out the worst in political parties.
But for the NSW Liberals they have turned the spotlight on a
seismic internal shift.

The takeover of the NSW Liberal Party by its warriors of the
right has been an exercise of military precision, characterised by
patience, stealth and attention to every bylaw in the party's
constitution.

Many branches in the party's northern heartland are in the
control of a conservative faction led by the upper house MP David
Clarke, as are many of its governing bodies, its women's council
and even its youth wing.

This hearts-and-minds battle is so bitter it even spills into
the names each side uses for the other. "Why do you call them the
'moderates', and call us the 'hard right', the 'religious right',
or the 'far right'?" a right source says. "I don't mind the term
'right', but why don't you call them the 'left'?

"They're the ones with the radical agenda. They are disguising
what they stand for. We stand for the status quo on issues like
traditional marriage, lowering of the age of consent, the
constitutional monarchy."

The moderates are equally vehement about the term "left". "How
can you be described as left-wing when you believe in voluntary
unionism, AWAs, lower taxation, the rights of the individual?" says
one prominent moderate.

The move to the right in the Liberal Party, which still boasts
it is a broad church, can be explained in part by John Howard's 10
years as Prime Minister. "John Howard has put the flag in the
ground. He's stood up for mainstream values," Clarke, a lawyer,
says.

Moderates agree Howard's policies on border protection have
moved public views on issues such as immigration and
multiculturalism to the right. But they dispute that community or
party views on social issues have shifted. "The vast majority of
the party's membership holds moderate to conservative views, which
is what we are: a liberal party, a conservative party, but one not
hidebound by any particular view," says a leading moderate MP, Greg
Pearce.

The other factor at work in the shift to the right is a
concerted campaign to build the faction's clout within the party,
through systematic branch stacking and manipulation of the party
rules.

"This is just correcting the balance in the party," one senior
right source says when asked about his alleged direct involvement
in branch stacking. "I believe that 80 per cent of the Liberal
Party are conservative. In the past that percentage has been sifted
out, the higher up the party structure you go."

Now it's time to redress it.

Clarke's agenda is not economic, but social and moral. "I work
on the premise that most people have conservative values in the
Liberal Party and that my values are in alignment with theirs," he
says.

Clarke, a practising Catholic with sympathies to Opus Dei, is a
vehment campaigner against abortion. He is strongly against
recognition of same-sex marriages, embryonic stem cell research and
the lowering of the age of consent for homosexuals.

He's a monarchist and he believes in a democratic society. But
he denies wanting to recriminalise homosexuality, a view that has
been attributed to him in the past. "I believe it is an undeniable
fact we were founded as a Christian nation and we have a society
based on Judeo-Christian concepts. As part of those values I
believe in freedom of faith and religious tolerance, including
tolerance of those with no religious views at all."

So, if he had control of the party would he legislate to make
abortion illegal? "In NSW abortions are already illegal, but
exceptions to the law over the years have been widened. Very often
girls are pressured by their partners to abort and that's not
really choice," he says.

The right's ascendancy began in the late 1990s in the Young
Liberals, where, if those involved in the moderate faction are to
be believed, Clarke played a crucial role. It was then, in his late
40s, that Clarke began attending Young Liberal state council
meetings "taking copious notes" at the back of the room, says a
former senior Young Liberal.

Another former senior Young Liberal says: "What I thought was,
'What was this 50-year-old, strange-looking man doing hanging
around with all of these teenagers?' "

Clarke denies the claims, saying he has been to only five or six
Young Liberal state council meetings in the past eight years and
only to collect his daughter.

But there seems little doubt within the party that Clarke and
his able lieutenant and staffer, Alex Hawke, joined in a concerted
campaign to win the Young Liberals for the right.

The takeover was complete in 2002 when Hawke won the presidency
by five votes. Tellingly, less than four years later, not one
member of the Young Liberal state executive is from the moderate
faction.

Moderates now claim people with liberal social views find it
difficult to join many Young Liberal branches because of careful
screening. Others leave because they don't like what they hear.

One former Young Liberal, a student who did not want to be
named, says he joined the Sydney University Young Liberal Club last
year because he was a supporter of John Howard but decided the
views of fellow club members were too right-wing.

"They were well and truly right-wing to the point of being
fanatically concerned with religion and abortion," he says.
"Extreme right would be how I'd describe it."

These days, Young Liberal policy includes the closure of the
heroin injecting room at Kings Cross, the privatisation of the ABC
and SBS, and revoking the tax-exempt status of all donations over
$2 to Greenpeace.

It's a far different world from 1994, the last time the Liberals
were in power in NSW, when the Young Liberal movement voted for the
decriminalisation of marijuana and the "controlled availability of
heroin".

The most controversial accusation made by moderates is the use
of "double agents" or "sleepers" by the conservatives - people who
join the party, claim to have moderate views and become friends
with moderates, while secretly working for the right and trying to
take over branches.

One of those who has come under attack as a sleeper is Kyle
Kutasi, who is engaged to Clarke's daughter, Anne-Marie. Kutasi is
said to have taken over three Young Liberal branches, including
Newtown, by posing first as a moderate and bringing in friends. He
denies the accusations but will not comment further, saying he has
been burnt by journalists in the past.

In an interview two years ago, Hawke told the Herald the
double agent accusations were lies. He said people who were
initially interested in the left had simply decided their views
were better suited to the right. But Hawke also admitted he had
embarked on a recruitment campaign.

"We're going to breed a generation of young conservative people
to go forward, sort of like the left did. A lot of the people -
John Brogden, Joe Hockey, Marise Payne - the people sitting in
Parliament now came through the Young Liberals from their side.
Well, we're doing the reverse to make sure we've got
conservative-thinking MPs that go into Parliament. Because at the
end of the day that's what changes society."

In the past 18 months, the organised takeover has spread to the
party's governing body, state executive, and to the main
branches.

The moderates held the balance of power on the state executive
for two decades, a fact Clarke frequently notes. But just over a
year ago the balance tipped and the right now has two-thirds of the
votes.

The state executive is elected by branch delegates, who are
usually allowed a free vote. But moderate sources say the right has
made a concerted effort to round up delegates' votes either by
encouraging them to vote for the right ticket or even collecting
the voting papers of uninterested delegates and filling them
out.

At the same time, the right was busy taking over small branches
and establishing new branches in areas where Liberal Party support
is weak, such as the inner west and south-western Sydney.

One example was Petersham-Lewisham, where Hawke co-ordinated the
ousting of the 70-year-old president, Betty Mihic, a party veteran.
Mihic did not take it lying down and fired off a colourful missive
to every member of the state council.

"We have never seen these people in our areas until they arrived
and ambushed our branch. I found the tactics used against us
frightening and intimidating. We were threatened in our home and
our branch members were treated extremely rudely and aggressively -
our branch records were ripped out of my hands," she wrote.

The advance on branches has now moved to Sydney's northern
suburbs, where the real prizes are safe seats.

Three months ago the office holders of one small branch in the
state seat of Ryde, including a party stalwart, Daphne Spurway,
were ousted. A young man, Nathan Smith, had joined the branch two
years ago and appeared friendly. Then, more recently, he signed up
six or seven friends, enough to tip the balance of power within the
17-person branch.

The same thing then happened in the Ryde state conference and
the Bennelong federal conference, the Prime Minister's own
seat.

Is recruiting six or seven people branch stacking? Perhaps not.
But the comprehensiveness of the takeover has left long-time
members bitterly disillusioned. "The whole concept of a party is
working together. If some of their people had been elected we would
have worked with them. I can't see that happening now," says one
long-time Ryde member.

The moderates have not taken the challenge lying down and have
engaged in their own branch stacking, shoring up bastions such as
Berowra and Cronulla. In seats such as Epping the branch stacking
is more blatant: more than 120 unfinancial members of the
Cherrybrook branch have been reactivated in the past three
months.

The numbers are expected to benefit the right's candidate, Greg
Smith, Nathan's father, a prominent lawyer and former president of
the NSW Right to Life Association who is engaged in a robust race
for preselection against the Federal Sex Discrimination
Commissioner, Pru Goward.

It won't stop with Epping either. There will be battles in
Wollondilly, Hawkesbury, Ryde and Davidson.

Peter Debnam declined to comment. "This is about internal party
matters. People in NSW are interested in service delivery," he
said.

SPONSORED LINKS

1151174401727-smh.com.auhttp://www.smh.com.au/news/national/party-animals/2006/07/01/1151174401727.htmlsmh.com.auSydney Morning Herald2006-07-01Party animalsThe takeover of the NSW Liberals has been marked by patience,
stealth and attention to every bylaw in the party's constitution,
write Anne Davies and Andrew Clennell.National